Bellack, Alan S.

I was born in New York City, November 27, 1944. An only child, I lived with my parents and maternal grandmother in an apartment building in the Bronx throughout my childhood. I attended public schools and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School at the age of 16. I was an indifferent student in high school, and while I achieved good grades, I had not developed any strong academic interests or career ambitions. Neither of my parents had attended college, and we all viewed it simply as a logical extension of high school. I applied only to the City College of New York, which was free, a short subway ride from home, and which, coincidentally, had an excellent academic reputation. I selected engineering as my major, for lack of any other defined interest, and to my great dismay soon discovered my lack of facility for calculus and physics. After being put on academic probation, I changed my major to psychology, albeit still without great passion or a real understanding of what psychologists actually did. Nonetheless, my grades and interest in the field improved to the point where I decided to pursue graduate school. With my overall GPA dragged down by my early fiasco with mathematics and hard sciences, I was not competitive for a PhD program, but I was accepted into the master's degree program at St. Johns University. I completed that program with (just about) straight A's and a reasonable facility at projective tests and psychodynamic therapy. The first of a series of serendipitous events that have shaped my career and life than occurred when I decided I liked psychology enough to pursue a PhD (although, to be honest, I still had little idea what real psychologists do). I completed the master's program in January of 1967. That being the Vietnam era, I had a student deferment and would have been drafted if I had waited until September to continue graduate school. The only quality doctoral program that admitted students in midyear was Pennsylvania State University, so I applied there and trundled off to State College, PA, with little idea about what the program was like or what it was like to live away from home.

The years at Penn State were clearly a defining period in my life. I discovered psychology, research, behavior therapy, and big-time college football. More important, I discovered my future wife, Barbara, who was a student in a course for which I was the teaching assistant. The critical academic influences were Robert Stern, a physiological psychologist, who was kind enough to let a clinical student work in his laboratory and learn about science, and fellow graduate students, who were highly critical of the psychodynamic and client-centered approaches promoted by the senior clinical faculty. Behavior therapy was still a nascent discipline at the time, and most of my early education about it came from informal discussions and an odd seminar or two. Nevertheless, something about the behavioral approach struck a chord, and it [Page 177]became a central component of my professional identity and the focal point of the next 20 or so years of my career.

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